Lot Essay

Judgement about this portrait has to make allowance for its condition. It was accepted as a late autograph work by Michael Hirst (op. cit., 1981) but Professor Roberto Contini (op. cit., 2008) has questioned this. Professor Mauro Lucco regards a larger panel formerly in the Dolgorukov collection as autograph. Rather larger and evidently better preserved, this differs most obviously in the position of the frontal parapet, which is placed lower, but was originally in same position as in the Kennet picture. A copy formerly in the Barberini collection and recorded as on loan in Palazzo Venezia, Rome (which Lucco, on the basis of photographs, regarded as by Sebastiano’s studio), corresponds in this respect with the Kennet picture, and suggests that this has been reduced, most noticeably on the left, but also above, and possibly at the outer edges. The Dolgorukov version corresponds in size with the picture recorded in Barberini inventories, but the Kennet picture may very well originally have been on the same scale. Despite its condition, the modelling of such passages as the right hand and what survives of the drapery seems characteristic of the artist and the picture was presumably Sebastiano’s prototype. Hirst comments that it was 'once very beautiful' (op.cit., p. 208). The survival of a version and a copy imply that the sitter was a personage of some significance.

Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919), the artist, was a notable collector of old master pictures, including Titian’s Tarquin and Lucrezia, which he presented to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and old master drawings, his collection of which he sold to J. Pierpont Morgan in 1910.